9 N.J. nursing homes may soon be ranked among the worst in the country

Nine New Jersey nursing facilities —
including the troubled pediatric care center in New Jersey where 11
children died last year in a deadly viral outbreak — may soon be ranked
among the worst in the country.

Two nursing facilities in the state are
already on the roster of 88 so-called “Special Focus Facilities” in the
country by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. They are
New Grove Manor in East Orange and Riverfront Rehabilitation and
Healthcare Center in Pennsauken.

The
Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Haskell, where the
deadly adenovirus outbreak took the lives of nearly a dozen young
patients, is the focus of ongoing federal and state investigations. In a
report in February, CMS said the facility it said was ill-prepared to
react to the rapid spread of a deadly strain of adenovirus that swept
through its pediatric wards. The report poor infection controls, delays
in seeking treatment of sick kids that led to significant medical
complications, as well as inadequate administrative oversight.

The other New Jersey nursing homes identified as SFF candidates included:

Millville Center spokeswoman Christine Emrick said she encouraged the public to check out the nursing home’s ratings at nursinghomecompare.gov, which earned four out of five stars for staffing levels, two stars for quality and 4.3 stars for customer satisfaction.

"With
that said, we are committed to providing high-quality care to our
patients and residents and are always striving to improve quality and
performance at the center,'' Emrick said.

Other nursing home representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.

Wanaque Center was fined $600,000
in the wake of the outbreak. Attorneys for Wanaque Center have said
they will contest the findings. But the nursing home’s possible
designation as a Special Focus Facility, or SFF, indicates that CMS
still has concerns over the quality of care at Wanaque, placing it among
other facilities that have a pattern of serious health and safety
violations.

Brian
Lee, executive director of Families for Better Care, a nonprofit
advocacy organization, applauded the Pennsylvania senators’ decision to
make the list of possible contenders public for the first time.

“People
want to know this information and they like these ‘hall of shame’
nursing home lists, so they can figure out where to put a loved one,”
Lee said. “They can be more tenacious as an advocate.”

Toomey,
in releasing the list, said “CMS has arbitrarily excluded from public
disclosure” hundreds of underperforming nursing homes.

“When
a family makes the hard decision to seek nursing home services for a
loved one, they deserve to know if a facility under consideration
suffers from systemic shortcomings. While the vast majority of nursing
homes provide high-quality care, there are some that are consistently
failing to meet objective standards of adequacy,” he said.

Casey said families deserve to have all the information available to choose the facility that is right for them.

“Across
Pennsylvania, and the nation, most nursing homes serve their residents
well and treat them with dignity and kindness. It is outrageous that we
continue to hear stories of abuse and neglect in nursing homes that do
not live up to these high standards,” he said in a statement.

During
a conference call with the media Wednesday, CMS Chief Medical Officer
Kate Goodrich said the list of 450 nursing homes which are candidates
for inclusion would be posted to the agency’s website soon, although she
did not say when.

Nursing homes are
selected based on past inspection reports and complaint surveys, then,
each state’s health department is asked to recommend whether these
nursing homes deserve the added scrutiny, she said.

“We
leave it up to the state, they know their community and nursing homes
better than we do,” Goodrich said. She recommended the public use nursinghomecompare.gov to find out more information about a specific nursing home’s safety and quality history.

The
list was created to flag nursing homes that have a lengthy track record
of falling short on inspections and have failed to remedy the problems
in a timely way.

“Such facilities with a ‘yo-yo’ or ‘in and
out’ compliance history rarely addressed underlying systemic problems
that were giving rise to repeated cycles of serious deficiencies,” according to the CMS website.

Once
on the list, CMS inspectors give the nursing home operators from 18
months to 24 months to make recommended improvements. Time extensions
may be granted. Failure to improve may jeopardize the nursing homes’
participation in the Medicare and Medicaid programs and the millions of
dollars that flow from them.

How the
federal government calculates who deserves the closer scrutiny has
always been something of a mystery, Lee said. After all, nearly 6,000
nursing homes earned only a one-star or two-star rating out of five on
CMS’ own nursinghomecompare.gov, but only about 450 are on this special watch list, he said.

The
impact of a nursing home landing on the list “is like dropping the
hammer,” Lee said. “When they get on the national hall of shame watch
list — more than they dislike the deficiencies, the fines, even the
lawsuits. Once they are pegged as a nursing home with a bad name, people
will stay away from you.”

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